


last time

by WabiSabi



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), Thor (Movies)
Genre: Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Not A Fix-It, Or maybe it is, Post-Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie), Reader Can Decide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-19
Updated: 2018-07-19
Packaged: 2019-06-12 19:23:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,258
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15346881
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WabiSabi/pseuds/WabiSabi
Summary: It was the simplicity of the act that convinced him of it truthfulness.Thor is sure that such a pathetic death would never had passed through his brother's mind. At least, not as his death.And it was what convinced him of the reality, more than his hand against a still chest and the sight of a proud, expressionless face as Loki had never been, that this time, truly and honestly, Thor lost his brother.





	last time

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaim: none of this characters belongs to me. This was write as non profit.
> 
> So, is 1AM in my country and I can beraly see keyboard in front of me. But Infinity War broke my heart and I had to write something about it. I knew Loki was not going to survive and I was ready to say goodbye, but I was caught completely unguarded by Thor and how he wrecked my spirit. It have been months and I still feel so much for him, so I had no choice but to sit down and throw up everything on the computer.
> 
> So forgive me any gramma mistakes. English is not my first language and I wrote this instead of sleeping like I should since I have work tomorrow.

It was the simplicity of the act that convinced him of it truthfulness.

For all the ages that Thor knew him, among all the impatient hours waiting for the right products to be used in curled hair, or the microscopic care for the day's clothing and the weapons best suited to be satiated. Between fights dragged beyond reasonable and stubbornness to speak in circles, with more words than necessary – among all these things, among all these years, Loki has always been a drama queen.

Dying in his arms after saving him from a mortal attack, dying after eliminating a powerful enemy with a trick full of ingenuity ... that was just like his brother. Something that he definitely would have planned to happen – that he _did_ planned – If he ever happened to have any decision power over his own death. Falling in glory and heroism, last words full of meanings, something worthy of the ancient stories and songs that marked their childhood. Thor couldn´t tell how he did not predict when it occurred, so obvious it was now under the light of knowledge.

A low, muffled _crack_ , lifted from the ground like an animal?

Thor is sure that such a pathetic death would never had passed through his brother's mind. At least, not as _his_ death.

And it was what convinced him of the reality, more than his hand against a still chest and the sight of a proud, expressionless face as Loki had never been, that this time, truly and honestly, Thor lost his brother.

-

The intensity of his mourning, the first time, caught him off guard. Not his depth, for Thor never doubted his love for Loki, just like he never doubted his love for his parents or his world or his friends. It was present and constant, though not always so welcome.

(How many times he had wished, in moments of anger or frustration after a fight, for a different brother? Or that at least the one he had had tastes, thoughts more similar to his?)

(Or, in times of distinct fury, to be an only child?)

The intensity, though. A pain unlike anything he felt in all his centuries, the agony of discovering unworthy of his identity and his home multiplied by infinity.

Thor was familiar with mourning, which mightn´t have been so expected of a species with such a long life expectancy that the rest of the universe saw them as immortal. Halfway through his second millennium of life in a society that valued the glory of the battle, he lost his share of friends and battle companions. He saw funerals, made farewells to Valhalla.

What Thor didn´t understand until the moment that he saw his brother disappear into the emptiness of space, is, although familiar with mourning, he was unfamiliar with _loss_.

And for the first time he understood the stories and songs about heroes falling to their knees in cries of agony, indifferent to the Asgardian standards that dictated composure and dry eyes when confronted with death. Before, a few miserable hours before this comprehension, Thor used to shake his head at this dramatic and exaggerated literature.

The first time he lost Loki, Thor was still only beginning to realize just how foolish he had been for most of his life.

(Now he was. Odinson, only and alone.)

(It was far from what he had imagined.)             

And proud. One true loss, the first, and he found himself unable to sit down at his brother's farewell ceremony. The respect he felt for those who had to go through it more than once was an experience in humility, especially since he had known parents who had lost more than one child, women and men who buried more than one companion before their time. The agony of such an experience he could not imagine. His pain was large enough to suffocate him if he let it, and Thor and Loki had never being joined at the hips.

Perhaps, when younger, they had been closer, the simplicity of a child's life allowing more time together, less intolerances between different opinions.

Over time, however, they followed each their path. Loki with his deep interest in magic and the desire to delve into the academic arena and Thor on his way to becoming the next king, his future as army general – they didn´t had that much time for each other, other than the small moments in their days when their paths intersected or when the family met.

If Thor were to analyze rationally, the absence of Loki in his life shouldn´t have been half as destabilizing as it were. Comparatively, he spent _hours_ more on the side of the Warriors Three and Lady Sif than with Loki.

What was a handful of conversations, a few taunts thrown in the hallway, he on his way to find Odin and Loki on his way to find Frigga?

What was it about not having to dodge pieces of food thrown by a mischievous grin on the other side of the hall during festivities?

What was it about not having to get out of his well-deserved rest to fetch his little brother with his nose buried in books, because it had been hours since he last eat and their mother was getting worried?

And yet the image of an empty chair beside him at the royal table burned his eyes, stole his appetite. Silence instead of jokes made at the expense of other noble’s dignities, of stories about a new trick, a new discovery of what seiðr could do, was deafening. It would lessen his patience to hear a joke that would have made him laugh once, it would bitter his interest in any tale told by the bad words of someone who did not use them every day.

Suddenly he became intensely, painfully aware of the few hours of his day spent with his brother when, overnight, he was no longer there to occupy them.

Perhaps that was the reason for such dissonance that losing Loki for the first time caused in his life. Not someone with whom he spent his every minute with, but someone with whom he could had _always_ spent every minute of his if he ever choose to.

It was not the loss of a statue taken under his roof. It was the loss of a pillar, part of his foundation.

Of what he has always taken for granted.

Because Loki was that. Like his parents, like Asgard, like air and the sun, his brother had always been a part of his life, even he rationally knew there was 400 years he lived alone under the title of heir to the royal family. Like losing a limb (like losing his eye), something that he never gave due attention to because it had always been there, but to see himself suddenly without was reason for him to stumble, confused – a presence he never truly appreciated whose absence became central in his life.

-

 

"Your brother, huh?"

Thor, once upon a time a few hours ago, would have smiled at the awkward attempt of condolences of the curious creature in his company. Perhaps lacking the gentle tact that some customs would say necessary, but it was sincere as far as the sympathy for a complete stranger can be sincere. They knew each other in what was an insignificant fraction of their lives in his eyes, and so at any other time he would had greatly appreciated the attempt at empathy.

The terrible size of the mourning in front of him, however, threatened to swallow him completely if even for a second he weakened his hold on the wall around him. A black and infinite vastness, his own compartmentalized Void and him on the verge, his back turned against it, struggling to breathe in the vacuum around him in its attempt to engulf him and leave nothing behind.

Because Thor knew, in full rationality, it would be virtually impossible for him to continue if he turned around and fully faced what awaited him, on the other side of the wall that self-preservation erected at first, and which he now maintained by mere cowardice.

Once, years ago, the gesture would have ashamed him.

However, Thor left such nonsense ideas behind.

He focused instead, following his instinct in order not to die even with a healthy body. _One thing at a time_. He choose Loki first: perhaps out of habit, it certainly was not by degrees of bearableness. Talking about his brother in the past was no easier than talking about any other, but at least there was already a script he could follow, born of repeated experiences. It was the most _doable_ , you might say. At least for the moment. When the hatred running through his veins finally exhaust itself, if it will remain the same it was another story.

"It's not the first time he dies, but something tells me this time it will be the last one." He said and the wordplay came out wrong, too flat and too honest to be the attempt to minimize that he wanted it to be.

Nevertheless, it was what Loki would–… _'wanted'_ might be too strong a word for the one who wrote a dramatic play in his own honor. However, Thor was sure his attempt at joking with one of the worst things that ever happened in his life would have earned at least a smile from the patron of breaking social conventions.

A memory flash – a long table, the most important Æsir and Álfr present and Loki with cup in hand and wounded pride sharpening his tongue, exposing the hypocrisy of every single occupant without pause or pity, and it reminded him, like his chest being opened, of his father's purple face and his mother shocked expression, of Sif raising a knife like a sword and Heimdall impassive demeanor and the noble’s enraged cries and the plebeian´s hidden laughter and of Asgard, whole and the golden, of his _home_ -

Thor forced it all in with a strength born of despair, memories carbonizing the air inside his lungs.

"What else do I have to lose?" He said for lack of choices that wouldn´t undo his effort, and thought for a moment how honesty was different from stating the obvious.

Honesty would be the fleeting and desperate ‘ _really?_ ' whispered in his chest when Eitri warned him of the most likely consequence of his decision.

State the obvious was to demonstrate his resolve in not dying because of something as purposeless as burned alive by the force of a star. _Only if I die_ , indeed. Thor made a promise and there was no force capable of taking him out of this universe before he fulfilled it, not even himself. For there was more at stake than the claustrophobic loneliness in the bay of all that he was, and Thor learned some time ago not to be selfish and was determined to take that lesson with him to the grave.

Because even without his vow to Thanos, there was an oath to his soul he did before all that he broke, so the least he can do was ensure the sacrifice of all that he ever knew was not in vain – _revenge_ , and making sure no part of it ever happens with someone else.

After-

Well, after was after.

-

Banner was the only one looking to his sides, dark eyes straying from his figure for something over his shoulder. All the others fixed on his face, clasping his hands and hugging him, ignoring the empty space around him. Banner did not give him mere seconds of individual attention before jumping into _nothingness_ perpetuating in his company.

The realization that took his face in pale tones demonstrated how far the mortal man's empathy was, seeing as the ashes still flew through the air between the two of them when Banner breathed a quiet " _Oh_."

He remembers how, some time after they had begun to navigate an air of _possibilities_ , Banner quietly inquired him in a rare and unique moment of complete privacy about _Loki_ and _forgiveness_. More specifically, on the two concepts connecting, in a way that it was easy to see that understanding the reason behind such link was beyond the mortal's ability, not matter the force within his mind.

 _Why_ , is what Banner notoriously said. And Thor remembers how utterly terrible he was at explaining, not because he did not have the finesse to speak of such matters or even because he did not have the vernacular. Rather because he couldn´t find a true way to pass on the notion of his relationship with his brother to someone who would live for less than a century. Although he knows that bonds don´t necessarily depend on larger periods to be forged in true durability, a prejudiced side of him will always wonder if so little time in life is enough to truly connect with another person.

The mortal seemed to perceive his actions as guided by a naive sense of loyalty or love, and although it is true that Thor will love his brother until the last day of his existence, there is nothing _naive_ about his decision of forgiveness.

How to explain the way the relative weight of one or two betrayals is dissolved in face of a lifetime? Thor and Loki fought countless times, they hurt and hated and bleed each other, and always moved on without aftereffects, for the fight was always forgotten in the second one decided to ignore it by addressing the other – in the second one side showed disinterest in continuing it, the arguments were left aside.

It is more selfish than anything else, because it is not about giving forgiveness to those who do not deserve it. It is about welcoming someone back in spite of the injustice that this brings to thousands of other people, simply because it's what Thor wants to do.

Thor would forgive Loki of almost anything, if Loki forgave him too. And vice-versa.

"Because he's my brother." That is the succinct version of what he answered, and at the time, he thought it was the only thing Bruce really understood, for a few seconds there was only _pity_ in the mortal's face

Hours (days- centuries- _millennia_ ) later on an Earth clouded with ashes, Thor realizes _he_ was the one who underestimated his friend, when he hears him breathe, once. " _Oh_."

He would have apologized at that moment if he could.

-

In the nights that follows, Thor does not sleep.

It is a surprise then when he suddenly comprehends he is dreaming.

"I must have fallen asleep unintentionally," he says to Loki's back, watching his younger brother analyze a piece of Statesman jammed in the ice floor.

There is only ice, as far as his eye can see, with dark shapes behind white clouds and cold haze that he thinks are mountains. There are no trees or any other sign of life in the warm tones his Asgardian eyes are accustomed to distinguish, even though he knows, intellectually, that all the planets sustained by Yggdrasil possess diversity in both fauna and flora.

Loki turns on his heels in his direction, holding up his familiar expression of disgust. " _Why_ , in the name of Odin, are you dreaming of this place?"

Thor looks around at the clear sky and the uneven ground covered in snow interrupted periodically by fragments of the Grandmaster's ship. The wrecked carcass is a few yards from where they are, coughing black smoke as it sinks slowly into the temporary puddle that its still boiling metal creates as it comes in contact with more ice.

Thor swallows, filled with the wish that he had paid more attention to the few times he had been in Jotunheim, because perhaps there would have more details around him now if he had. "Why are you judging me for my dream? I do not control it."

"That's exactly why I'm judging you. Dreams are manifestations of our subconscious." Loki waves unimpressed to the destruction. “What kind of convoluted metaphor is your brain trying to create here? Should I punch you or pity you? "

He approaches the twisted piece of iron his brother had been observing and discovers when he comes close enough, that it is incredibly similar to Odin's staff. When he leans over and picks it up in his cold hand, however, it spontaneously turns into Loki's staff, with the Mind Stone pulsing in ugly blue at the end, just like the last time he saw her in his brother's hands.

It does not make sense how he develops a problem to breathe. After all, he is in a dream. "I do not know. Wasn´t you who graduated with honors in the DreamWalk class? You tell me."

Loki huffs pompously. "I graduated as a joke."

"I remember you studying religiously for the final tests."

"Well, just because it was a joke does not mean I should look bad while doing it."

Almost inadvertently, Thor smiles. "What's the verdict, then?"

His brother examines him through the corners of his eyes, his chin raised slightly in an imperial way. "Punch you, definitely." He replies as he folds his arms, his tone becoming more contemptuous. "Honestly, brother, you should be ashamed of yourself with how clichéd and unimaginative your mind is to deal with trauma. It is just no more stereotypical than the 'fleeing' kind of dream. "

Thor closes his eyes briefly, and if he could do something like that at that moment, he might have laughed.

But he can´t.

"I've had those. They are not very interesting." He says and lets the staff slip through his fingers.

Loki catches it before it reaches the ground and in his palm, the iron staff turns into a carved bone dagger. That the God of Lies immediately turns in his direction, and fails to erect any sense of alarm or danger in himself.

"I thought you were going to punch me."

He shrugs. "Stabbing is like punching, only with something pointed at the end. Anyway, punching you in a dream would bring no satisfaction. I'll wait until I can do it personally. "

"I don´t think that our Mother will be very happy if the first thing we do when I arrive at Valhalla is fight."

"As if I would go to Valhalla. Freyja would certainly choose me to enter Folkvangr, seeing my splendid beauty. "

This time Thor laughs a low unexpected sound that takes him by surprise. Loki watches him for a moment in absolute silence and he tries not to let it induce him into panic – _do not fall into silence, do not disappear, do not choke and leave me without something-_

This conversation hurts like few things he have ever experienced, and Thor wishes he could never have to wake up again.

"I don´t mean to expect us both to be dead to punch you."

He closes his eyes one more time, feeling the brief laugh dying on his lips.

"Thor."

Loki makes a frustrated sound when he refuses to look back at him, even when he feels the cold of a blade against his cheek. He presses it menacingly for several seconds, but Thor does not submit, does not believe, and is proven right when he retreats a moment before it can actually start hurting him.

"Thor, you big oaf-"

"Please don´t." He asks- _begs_ quietly.

But because Loki is as he is, he ignores his request as someone would ignore an inconvenient fly, slapping it away with no more than a few seconds of hesitation. "I´m not dead. You know that. I found the Man of Iron and one of Thanos's daughters and we're going-”

Loki interrupts himself when Thor laughs, the sound being anything but lighthearted. " _I know_?"

A heartbeat.

"I fooled you twice. What is a third time?"

He opens his eyes and stares at his brother through a blurred curtain of salty water, who looks down at him in defiance with the knife still pointed in his direction. His voice shakes unsteadily as he speaks, humored with nothing but despair and agony. "What purpose would serve pretend having died at the hands of Thanos?"

The green eyes squinted. "You underestimate my sense of cruelty even after all these years."

"Are you telling me you did it for the sole purpose of hurting me? Because it would be such a poor explanation. You cannot expect me to believe that. "

Loki growls in his dream and steps forward, pressing the tip of the knife right above his heart. "What? Do you really think I would not do something like that?" He says with some anger, with some venom.

Thor smiles through his tears and shakes his head. "It's true that every time you pretended to have died you hurt me deeply. But it's also true that you did not plan any of them for the purpose of hurting me. It was just a byproduct. I know you, Loki, you are selfish, not cruel."

Loki does not respond immediately.

Then he tilts his head and replies. "There are advantages to your enemy being unaware of your survival."

-

Thor wakes up with a blanket over him, sitting against one of the castle's great doors.

-

He does not cry.

Somehow, this seems worsen the hurt even more.

-

On the way back to the room that the queen so generously lent him, Thor suddenly finds himself in the role of an inconvenient obstacle in the way of thousands of mortals, running frantically from side to side like frightened ants barely stopping to avoid him. When the fifth mortal falls to the ground after colliding with him, Thor decides to move away from the center of the corridor and go towards the control room while sticking as close to the wall as he can.

He is greeted by the image of a Captain America more _alive_ than he looked on all the previous days combined, blue eyes with heavy circles under fixed on the hologram on the middle of the table, with an intensity reflected in the white knuckle grip he has on the chair back. “-can slow down after entering the atmosphere?" He is saying, his voice echoing in concentration.

They are all there, Thor notes. Rhodey is on the other side of Steve, wearing an expression that only differs from the captain by the way his eyes are closed with something like relief. Bruce is at another table with the young princess of Wakanda, both their hands flying over projections and screens at a frantic speed, as they shout numbers and demands across the room – people running around the place obeys the two without pause, coming and going in a chaotic and organized pattern that Thor recognizes from the times he participated in war strategy meetings.

Even Natasha, who was not saw away from the communicators for the last few days, is here, arranging an impressive number of weapons side by side with the strange rabbit he recently discovered to be named Rocket.

An unbearable sound of static cuts through the air before a familiar voice steals the air from his lungs. " _Cap, if I could do that, we would not have a problem in the first place! This goddamn piece of junk is falling apart like a Jenga tower_ -"

" _I told you we should have gone to a planet with space stations!"_

" _And I said Earth has space stations!"_

_"If they cannot afford to dock a single escape craft, then what's the point? Our flesh will boil and melt from our bones as we breathe our evaporated skin as soon as we enter the atmosphere!"_

_"Because this cheerful, positive way of thinking is definitely going to help us now-"_

"Tony, focus!" Steve interrupts abruptly, his voice tense with something other than anger.

_"Hey, why don´t you yell at her too? I'm doing my best to keep this disgusting thing unworthy of being called a spaceship from falling apart while she vividly describes my very likely death directly on my ear-"_

"Stark?" Thor interrupts as soon as he can breathe again. With the exception of the princess and Bruce, they all look toward him, as if they just first noticed his presence on the room.

The tension does not diminish, even when Tony replies in an cheerfulness that, even through the static, sounds forced. _"Thor, buddy! Good timing! Hey, not waiting to be rude or anything since this is the first time we talked in like two year, but would you mind using your god-like-powers to fly over here and give us a ride back before we turn into reverse Laika 2?"_

The joke is lost on him, but Thor would have ignore it even if he had got the reference, accustomed to the way the Man of Iron prefers to talk. He approaches the table, seeing a projection of Earth with a single red dot approaching the edge of the planet's atmosphere with a fast and disorderly route – there is a screen showing a footage he assumes to be in real time of a ship that, had he seen it in Sakaar's dump, would not earned a second glance.

The dark template, however, catches his attention immediately. The design with hard lines and material more like poorly polished black stone, even by the rudimentary camera of the mortals, is terribly familiar to him – of a last conversation while observing the stars before everything was torn from his hands; the memory burned behind his eyes made of ember and hate.

"Thor."

He looks at the Captain abruptly and it is only when he sees him with his palms raised in a gesture of peace and all the other taking three, five steps back, the country warriors with the spears pointed towards him surrounding the princess and Bruce, that he perceives the absolute silence cut only by a hissing more familiar than his own name.

His skin tingles and his teeth seem to numb and the entire room is lit in white and blue as electricity pulses around him, humming menacingly in uneven arcs through the air.

 _Ah_.

He takes a deep breath, slowly, and opens his painfully clenched palms.

Five, ten seconds pass until his blood liquefies in his veins once again. The tremor beneath his skin does not stop, however, and Thor hesitates briefly before making the decision to push it all out into the heavens - The large window before framing a clear early morning sky darkens quickly as if someone had covered the sun, until the moment it explodes in white light.

Two seconds later the ground trembles with deafening thunder that blows the air.

"Forgive me, I- I lost myself for a moment."

No one answers, and Thor turns from shocked and nervous expressions to the hologram, in time for the transmission system to return to normal, and the voice of Tony and the unknown woman once again overlap the static with a distinct alarm tone.

_"-the hell was that?!"_

_"-have Thor son of Odin with you?!"_

He ignores the questions, fighting the urge to close his fingers again. “Stark, why are you aboard a Thanos ship?"

There is an elongated pause, interrupted only by the explosions of electricity shaking the skies of Wakanda.

When Tony responds, the incomprehensible weight in his words makes him sober in his fury. _"That's a- a long story."_

Thor hesitates, opening his mouth for a moment – but the words do not come out, his voice refuses to form the question. A lump in his throat, holding it inside his chest.

In the end, he does not have the guts, and asks instead. "Where are you, exactly?"

_"We sent our coordinates through your outdated system."_

The voice, although feminine, has a metallic touch that does not manifest when Tony speaks, which makes him believe that it is inherent of its owner. Is not someone familiar to him, he is almost certain. "Who's talking?"

_"... they call me Nebula, Odinson."_

"Are you familiar with me?"

_"Rumors do not describe you as humble, Thunderer. I imagine every galaxy has heard of Odin's eldest son, on one way or another."_

He smiles without humor. "Not the oldest."

" _Wait, what? There's more than Reindeer-_ "

Thor interrupts, because would hurt too much to answer that question. And in his haste, he makes a bet. "You're Gamorra's sister, aren´t you?"

There is absolute silence on the other side.

Is all the answer he needs.

-

Thor joins two Wakanda ships to go help Tony.

With Terran technology working to decelerate the uncontrolled spacecraft into the atmosphere and Thor guiding it manually, it lands more or less intact. There is still an alarming black smoke being coughing by several points and he can recognize the absence of at least 2/3 of the steering thrusters and overheating of all. It is a little more than a miracle that they managed to make that ship fly, much more to have piloted it to Earth.

Magical, indeed.

It's the first thing he says when he pulls the door open and pulls Tony Stark out, followed by a blue woman with more metal than organic matter composing her body.

"Goldilocks, there was nothing magical about it. I felt like a kid who only played with Legos his entire life who suddenly had to assemble a motorcycle and somehow managed not to lose his hand. I don´t like this feeling, by the way. Not knowing what I'm doing sucks."

"Hey, idiots, the ship is going to explode in three seconds!" The rabbit Rocket screams from several feet away.

Nebula immediately shoots at a speed that in a single blink of an eye put her on the other side of the field where they landed the ship. Thor simply grabs Tony by the waist and throws Stormbreaker up, the man making a protesting sound that turns into a squeak when the spacecraft actually _implodes_.

Pieces fly everywhere, flames licking the dirt floor.

The smell of burned fuel is terrible and it corrupts the air.

Thor lands where the rest of the group is – Rhodey is the first to break the formation with two determined steps where the second temporarily invades his personal space just to rip Tony off from him in a hug. Bruce comes right behind, seeming to have aged in relief.

Steve and Natasha do not move from where they are and Thor remembers the little explanation that they gave him on _why_ the group was not all present during the fight. Judging by the distance they maintain, somewhat petty, the fights still weighs heavily upon mortals; judging by Steve's expression, the desire for a reunion is as great as, if not greater, than the tension.

Thor turns to the shell of the spacecraft, giving his friends the privacy window they had earned.

“Were you the single passengers?" He asks Nebula, still farther away from the group.

Her black eyes regard him intensely, cautiously. "Yes. No one else survived."

Thor breathes once, slowly.

"We should go. We have a lot to talk about,"Tony says, sounding incredibly tired behind him.

There is a silent chorus of agreement in the way everyone moves unhurriedly toward the airplanes piloted by the deadly black warriors. Thor keeps one last look of the wreckage, a reminiscence burning behind his eyes that paint the earth in white for a brief terrible second.

He turns, then, and follows his friends.


End file.
